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PETIONVILLE, HAITI—Enel Avelus, Lovely’s father, bought a motorcycle last week. Together with the lock and helmet, it cost about $960 — more than four times the annual rent of his family’s small, concrete-block home, more than he earned in total last year, more money than he’s ever spent in one splendid moment of his life.

If all goes according to plan, it will be Avelus’s — and his family’s — ticket out of poverty. He intends to use it as a taxi, threading clients through the choked streets of this city.

It was a gift from a complete stranger in Canada.

“It’s beautiful,” he says, stroking the cherry-red flank of the Apollo LF2-150, parked in the speckled shade of a tamarind tree beside the small motorcycle store where, after hours of visiting motorcycle shops, we finally found one for sale.

Lovely, I should remind you, is one of Haiti’s miracle children. On the early evening of Jan. 12, 2010, she was watching television with her best friend in her family’s two-storey apartment building in a Port-au-Prince slum when the 7.0 earthquake hit. Her friend Gaelle died. Lovely, then only 2, was dug out by neighbours six whole days later, without a scratch on her small body.

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The international doctors who treated her for dehydration and malnutrition at a makeshift medical clinic assumed she was an orphan. But a second miracle awaited: her mother, brother and father had also survived. Reunited, they moved into a hastily erected tin shed up in the mountainous countryside southeast of the city, where Lovely’s uncle is a tenant farmer.

She was a symbol of Haiti’s resilience and vulnerability. Before the earthquake, she’d been wretchedly poor. Now she was also homeless.

Many Star readers were moved to help Lovely, sending me money for her schooling, food and rent. Paul Haslip was one of them. He’s an investment adviser from Pain Court, a French-speaking farming village 45 minutes east of Windsor. At 60, he leads what he describes as a “comfortable life” — Bay St.-style salary, big house, nice vacations with his wife of 20 years.

That Christmas, he asked his family to send money for Lovely’s family instead of gifts. Other than donations he’d made to local village initiatives, it was the first time Haslip had ever given money to charity.

“I didn’t want her to fall by the wayside after having all that happen to her,” Haslip told me over the phone. “Let’s make sure she survived for a reason.”

Last summer, Haslip wrote me to say he wanted to do more. He wanted to help Lovely’s father develop a profession so he could work his own way out of poverty. He was offering Enel a once-in-a-lifetime chance to go back to school and learn a trade.

In most ways, Enel is a better reflection of Haiti than his daughter. He grew up poor, on a farm near the southern town of Jacmel. Like most Haitians, he had little schooling, having to leave by Grade 3 to earn money. He can’t read or write. He moved to a crowded apartment in a blooming slum in the capital with the hope of finding a job, which never materialized.

Instead, he’s always relied on luck and his brawn. Before the earthquake, he earned about $2.50 a day selling sugar cane on the streets. Since 2010, he’s worked the odd job, selling pop from a bucket on the side of the street and hauling buckets of dirt from a construction site. He’s often out of work. His life is a constant hustle between hunger, worry and sweat.

He now has four kids to feed — three of his own, including newly born daughter Anastania — and a nephew who moved from the dusty countryside to live with him. The two things he has going for him: the love of his family which, unlike most Haitian families, is still united, and the generosity of strangers in Canada.

Few of us, whether in Haiti or Canada, get an offer to restart our lives.

Enel could have chosen carpentry, plumbing, even police work. He thought about it for a couple months. In the end, he picked driving a taxi, since it was the quickest route to feeding his family. It was a good choice, I think.

You can’t get far in Port-au-Prince without seeing a motorcycle taxi. There are no “taxi” signs on the bikes, but every man on a motorcycle is for hire. They hang out in “stations” — which are really just street corners — waiting for calls on their cellphones from clients.

The vast majority of Haitians can’t afford cars and use motorcycle taxis to get around town quickly. Their other options are “tap-taps,” pickup trucks retrofitted into small public buses, and taxis, which are beat-up cars that act like small buses, picking up passengers along the route. Both of those are inevitably stuck in the glut of traffic that constantly chokes the capital’s streets.

Motorcycle taxis, on the other hand, dodge and weave and sneak around the mess, often stealing dangerously into the oncoming lane.

They are thrilling and dangerous to ride. They are tied with diabetes for the number one cause of amputations in the country.

But they also garner good money by Haitian standards. On a fine day, my regular motorcycle taxi driver, Bony, can make $36 — six times what Enel earns digging out the foundation of a nearby house. He has at least two fine days a week, he says.

“It’s a good business,” says Roland Fortune, who took Enel out on his motorcycle every weekday last month, teaching him how to balance and change gears. “I put my three kids through school with this.”

Enel showed me what he’d learned, climbing and descending the newly paved main road by his house on Fortune’s bike. He was a tentative driver, but capable. Despite Fortune’s broken brakes, Enel managed to stop.

“It was hard at first,” he says, “but once I figured it out, it was easy.”

He got his licence. Then, once I’d arrived with a stack of American bills from Haslip in my bag, we met in town to buy a motorcycle at one of the stores my translator had screened in advance.

Haiti is a country where you can buy almost anything on the side of the road — gas in bottles, cellphone minutes, cigarettes, U.S. dollar bills. The informal economy works brilliantly here. But the formal economy?

The first store we went to was still closed an hour after its posted opening. The second one reportedly sold motorcycles but had none in stock. The third place had two motorcycles on display, but both had already been purchased, the salesman said.

Our car broke down then, so we walked up the crowded streets, stopping at a department store that had beds, generators and motorcycles on sale. Fabulous! The clerk told us they were ready to go, except for one small problem — we’d need to get their papers from the customs office, which could take a week, likely more.

“You see why this country drives me crazy?” muttered my translator, who grew up in New York City.

Finally, we arrived at Mototech, a motorcycle store owned by an Israeli whom we found outside working on a four-wheel motorcycle buggy on sale for $35,550. There are many people with a lot of money in Haiti. He directed us to the Chinese-made motorcycles in our price range. Fortune advised Enel to buy the Apollo because “it’s not afraid of mountains, it’s not afraid of rocks.”

I snapped a photo of Enel beside his new bike and emailed it to Haslip in Canada.

“Now tell him to get to work,” Haslip wrote back. “I hope things go well for Enel and the whole family.”

Haslip knows there are no guarantees. Development doesn’t follow mathematical principles. We humans are messy, unpredictable creatures. Enel’s motorcycle could break down, get stolen, crash into a wall . . .

I enrolled him in a small-business course for people who can’t read. I hope that there he learns about financial planning.

But there are only so many training wheels we can apply. The rest is up to Enel.

Motorcycle taxis in Haiti run like hairdressers. They build up regular clients. Every driver is his own dispatcher, too. Enel will have to prove to his neighbours that he’s a good, reliable driver.

He hopes one day to drive Haslip down that newly paved street to his home, he tells me. That would be a magical sight: two men from different worlds, linked through kindness and hope.

I’d like to be there that day.

Catherine Porter’s column usually appears on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. She can be reached at cporter@thestar.ca

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